Searching for Steele

Broadcast: 02/04/2013

Reporter: Trevor Bormann (narrator)

Ten years after the start of the Iraq war, profound questions persist about the rationale for it, and the way it was waged. Among the most enduring – how did battalions of Iraqi police commandos become such a brutal, deadly force?

According to a fifteen month investigation by The Guardian and BBC Arabic, the Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

“The Ministry of Interior had 14-15 prisons - they were secret, never declared. But the American top brass and the Iraqi leadership knew all about these prisons. The things that went on there: drilling, murder, torture. The ugliest sorts of torture I’ve ever seen.”General Muntadher, former Iraqi army

The program profiles Colonel James Steele, a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was picked by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a violent Sunni insurgency.

In the 1980s Steele had been in charge of a US team of special military advisors who trained units of El Salvador’s security forces in counterinsurgency. The paramilitary squads committed serious human rights abuses, and allegations aired in this program implicate US advisors in similar abuses committed in Iraq.

A second special US adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005 and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention centres where torture took place and were involved in the processing of thousands of detainees.

Witnesses claim they must have known about what was going on.

Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres.

"We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I'm looking around I see blood everywhere." Gilles Peress, Photographer

The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the story with Peress.

"And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting: 'Allah, Allah, Allah!' But it wasn't kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror." Peter Maass, Journalist

The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorised the Sunni community and fuelled a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Steele has not responded to any questions from the Guardian and BBC Arabic about his role in El Salvador or Iraq. He has in the past denied any involvement in torture and said publicly he is "opposed to human rights abuses." Coffman declined to comment.

An official speaking for Petraeus said: "During the course of his years in Iraq, General Petraeus did learn of allegations of Iraqi forces torturing detainees. In each incident, he shared information immediately with the US military chain of command, the US ambassador in Baghdad ... and the relevant Iraqi leaders."